My column about music testing, the system under which no tune turns up on your radio unless a panel of "ordinary" people have pronounced it unlikely to disturb them too much, seems to have got me elected chief arbiter on overplayed tracks.

I have received several emails from people who actually play the tunes on the radio - wishing to remain anonymous (and employed, obviously) - moaning about the Groundhog Day nature of their job, nominating songs driving them to distraction. "Should I give up?" one email asked, "Or should I just keep chasing pavements?" Aside from sideswipes about young female Amy Winehousealikes, the most common complaint concerned the hackneyed oldies that crop up in playlists.

The two worst singles Stevie Wonder ever released were My Cherie Amour and I Just Called To Say I Love You (this is a proven scientific fact, by the way, established without the aid of a panel of listeners) - and yet they are among the handful of Stevie tracks now likely to feature in a music station playlist. Similarly, if you hear a Billy Joel track, there is a fair chance it will be the infuriating and unrepresentative Uptown Girl. It is as if Chuck Berry's entire 60 years in the business were to be distilled into My Ding-a-Ling (music stations do not do this, by the way, they just ignore him altogether).

But there is one man standing firm against the virus of triteness infecting our disc jockeys' computers, one man reminding us of what Noel Coward called the potency of cheap music. Take a bow, Mike Read.

Yes, that Mike Read. Frankie Goes To Hollywood Mike Read, Saturday Superstore Mike Read, the Mike Read chucked out of the jungle first, whose number one fan revealed she had named her washing machine Mike Read as a kind of tribute. So he carries a lot of baggage - there is more; Tory politics, tennis with Cliff Richard, a play about Oscar Wilde slaughtered by the critics - but he remains a superb disc jockey. He is presenting the morning show on a station called Big L 1395, from studios above a shop in Frinton, via a transmitter in Holland.

Big L is now owned by a couple of Essex entrepreneurs, and run by former programme controller of Classic FM and Radio 2 producer Chris Vezey. But you get the impression nobody is making a fortune from it. Not many of the adverts I heard - a guy selling CB radios in Northampton, for instance, and a commercial cleaning company in Holland - sounded like big earners.

For Read it is clearly a labour of love: "It's what radio used to do. Broadcasting, not narrowcasting. It's a really broad spectrum; Morrissey, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, a sprinkling of new songs like Steve Earle and Sharon Shannon."

In my view, though, the glory of the station is the old stuff. The first time I logged into Read's show on bigl.co.uk, I heard Tell Me from the Stones' first album, Child Of The Moon from Their Satanic Majesties, and Jagger and Richards' As Tears Go By by Marianne Faithfull. Next time, I heard Jackie Blue by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, and I was more or less hooked.

As well as Read, Radio 1 veterans Adrian John and David Hamilton broadcast on Big L, and they all share a big house in Frinton when they are working. Vezey often cooks them dinner. It is the Smashie and Niciness of all this that has attracted most of the publicity, which tends to ignore the delightful randomness of the music. Big L even dares play 50s tracks during the daytime, and when other stations offering "variety" are endlessly rotating the same songs you have been hearing for the past 30 years. That is surely something to celebrate.